Category: News

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Richard Davies.

Modern IT infrastructure needs to be highly flexible as the strain on servers, sites and databases grows and shrinks throughout the day. Cloud infrastructure is meant to make scaling simple by effectively outsourcing and commoditising your computing capacity so that, in theory, you can turn it on and off like a tap.

However, most approaches to provisioning cloud servers are still based around the idea that you have fixed-size server “instances”, offering you infrastructure in large blocks that must each be provisioned and then configured to work together. This means your infrastructure scaling is less like having a handy tap and more like working out how many bottles of water you’ll need…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Is cloud making a difference in Big Data efforts? Can it deliver the agility and scalability required to handle petabytes and exabytes’ worth of data coming out of enterprises and the Internet of Things? The answer to both questions is “yes, but,” according to highly engaging panel that was part of last week’s Data Summit, held in New York. I had the opportunity to moderate the panel, joined by David Mariani, CEO of AtScale, Wendy Gradek, senior manager with EMC, and Andy Schroepfer, chief strategy officer at Hosting.

Interestingly, the appeal of cloud is not about the cost at all — it’s about the change in the way enterprises view technology solutions. “People are fine with paying as you go,”said Mariani. “And they’ll probably pay more at the end of the day than they would if they paid up front.” Scalability is a huge factor in the appeal of cloud, said Gradek….

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Hamish Barwick.

Cloud computing has become ubiquitous for many companies but keeping it secure can be a challenge. Cloud Security Alliance Asia Pacific executive council chairman Ken Low shared the alliance’s top nine threats to the cloud at a Trend Micro event in Sydney.

9: Shared technology vulnerabilities

“In 2014, we have seen some of the most critical vulnerabilities such as Heartbleed which affected OpenSSL. That allowed people access to encrypted data,” said Low. There was also the discovery of the Shellshock vulnerability which affected the Bash shell. “Cloud service providers can scale their services by sharing infrastructure default to applications but the lack of strong isolation properties in monitored environments make them vulnerable,” said Low. He said that virtual patching can stop shared technology vulnerabilities…

Read more from the source @ http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/575299/top-9-cloud-computing-threats/

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Pedro Hernandez.

Extending its "lockbox" approach to securing data on the cloud, Microsoft’s research arm today announced a new technology dubbed Verifiable Confidential Cloud Computing, or VC3. Last year, the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant announced a new process for safeguarding cloud data called a lockbox.

Encompassing a set of technologies, along with strict policies and IT practices at the company’s cloud data centers, the approach essentially places customers in complete control of their data and requires that they issue their approval before even Microsoft’s own administrators can access protected information…

This latest virtualization exploit is being widely reported to affect virtual machines running on hypervisor platforms such as Xen, KVM and native QEMU. 

A security researcher, CrowdStrike, discovered and reported the new vulnerability, claiming it could allow a hacker to infiltrate potentially every machine on a datacenter’s network, leaving millions of virtual machines vulnerable to attack.

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Serdar Yegulalp.

The race to the bottom in cloud computing continues apace, and Google’s doing its best to plummet the fastest. The latest Google Cloud Platform revisions have cut prices between 5 and 30 percent for various virtual machine configuration types. Plus, there’s a new VM type, called Preemptible VMs, that seems specifically designed to put pressure on Amazon.

According to the official Google Cloud Platform blog, the current round of price reductions cuts the cost of a U.S.-based Standard instance by 20 percent, and a Micro instance by 30 percent, with similar price reductions set for Europe and Asia. Google’s pushing the whole package of cost reductions — including automatic discounts and per-minute billing — as a 40 percent cost reduction for common workloads over the competition…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Jason Perlow.

My ZDNet colleagues Ed Bott and David Gewirtz are both fed up with Microsoft over software licensing issues, albeit for different reasons. Ed is annoyed with Microsoft over its poor communication of its Windows editions and David just wants to line up Microsoft’s legal department in front of a firing squad.

Let’s be absolutely clear — figuring out software licensing, regardless of which vendor you are dealing with, is never fun. I never enjoyed it when I was an IT consultant in the financial sector, I hated it when I worked as a systems architect at IBM, and I certainly don’t enjoy it today in my role at Microsoft…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Nexenta (@Nexenta), the global leader of Open Source-driven Software-Defined Storage (OpenSDS) solutions and Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu and Ubuntu OpenStack, today jointly announced its strategic alliance agreement. The alliance will allow Canonical’s Ubuntu OpenStack customers to benefit from Nexenta’s full spectrum of OpenSDS products for their large scale private and hybrid clouds.

Since its launch in 2004, the Ubuntu OS, has become the natural choice for users of all kinds, from Fortune 500 companies to hardware makers, content providers, software developers and individual technologists. With developers, support staff and engineering centers all over the world, Canonical is uniquely positioned to help its partners and enterprise customers make the most of Ubuntu. Ubuntu is the leading cloud OS and Ubuntu OpenStack is the leading distribution of OpenStack. According to the OpenStack User Survey, over 55% of production clouds today run on Ubuntu, many of whom have large requirements for enterprise quality storage…

Grazed from V3.co.uk. Author: Editorial Staff.

Dropbox for Business has been awarded ISO 27018 cloud security certification by EY CertifyPoint, marking the latest step in the company’s bid to allay customer fears about privacy and data protection. The certification makes Dropbox one of a select few cloud service providers to meet ISO 27018 standards. Microsoft’s Azure platform was one of the first to receive the accreditation in February.

ISO 27018 was published by the International Organisation for Standardisation as a new component of the ISO 27001 standard in July 2014 and offers a variety of assurances for cloud service users. "ISO 27018 specifies guidelines based on ISO/IEC 27002, taking into consideration the regulatory requirements for the protection of personally identifiable information (PII) which might be applicable within the context of the information security risk environment(s) of a provider of public cloud services," read the ISO description…

Read more from the source @ http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2409027/dropbox-for-business-gets-iso-27018-cloud-security-classification

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Mike Vizard.

Under the heading of turning lemons into lemonade, Xplenty has reinvented itself as a provider of data integration services delivered via the cloud that don’t require any programming expertise. Xplenty founder and CEO Yaniv Mor originally created the Xplenty solution to provide the market with a platform for running Hadoop in the cloud.

Unfortunately, however, in 2014, his company discovered that there just wasn’t enough demand for Hadoop delivered as a cloud service, he told Talkin’ Cloud. The two primary issues, said Mor, was that fierce competition in the form of services such as Amazon Redshift and the simple fact that when it came to Hadoop most organizations prefer to deploy the open source framework for managing big data on premise…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/big-data-and-cloud-computing/05182015/big-data-integration-made-simpler